Phil, I agree that it isn’t over yet because there are many delays built into the less than stellar plan and it won’t be fully implemented until 2017. But in the meanwhile, young adults up to 26 are covered, those with pre-existing conditons will be covered, 20 million more people will be covered. Insurance companies will be forced to actually compete in the market place that they claim to love so that prices will fall for insurance for individuals and small businesses.

It ain’t over until we as a nation take the next step as Vermont is planning to do and develop true single payer health care for all!

Some years ago, the “Pest Control” industry concluded that utilizing nuclear warheads on mousetraps would be an amazingly effective manner of reducing mouse infestation, however the collateral side effects were deemed to be somewhat excessive.

Considering that the “Affordable Care Act” provides it’s own excessive, and in many ways counterproductive, excessive collateral damage, doesn’t mean improvement is not appropriate, it just a bad way to deal with an innsue of concern.

Tom,#4, you must be fooling! If competition among health insurance companies actually worked then the premiums would have been falling for both health services and pharmaceuticals.

Instead we’ve had greed, price fixing, and short-term profits over people’s lives and well-being. Along with the most rapid rate of increases ever. Creating the illusion of more competition “across state lines” wouldn’t change any of that.

If the government truly ran a comprehensive program of health care –not health insurance. That would preclude continuing to allow the insurance companies to keep reaping record profits. Then we’d see a much greater decrease in health care costs.

Hopefully the exchanges will offer some actual competition and thus help to decrease the premiums. This does seem to be slowly happening now in Massachusetts.

The ONLY way to fix the health care crisis in any meaningful way, is to get the greedy fingers of the insurance syndicates, out of the health care dollar pool. Insurance companies provide absolutely NOTHING to actual health care, and provide the mechanisms that allow the nation’s wealth to flow to the few at the top, which is why they have assigned so many trained operatives to moderate the discussion. If you think, for one second, that they want an honest discussion of the issue, when such discussions would end their convenient take, then you are living in an artificial reality. One sixth of our economy is tied to health care, and those benefiting from the scam to siphon a Lion’s share off the top for their own pockets, are not about to let the focus fall on what is really going on. The One-Payer plan has been proved treatment effective and cost effective, in every industrialized nation where it has been implemented, and there is no excuse why we should continue to allow the greedy to suckle at so important a teat, when so many are forced to go hungry as a result.

“HOPEFULLY the exchanges will offer some actual competition and thus help to decrease the premiums”, from a “wishfull thinking” perspective not a bad objective. However considering that just about every projection of anticipated costs related to this AFORDABLE Care Boondoggle, pans aout to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% of what actual costs are now projected at, “Affordable” seems beyond the reach of even the brightest rose colored glasses.

Add to that the reality, that ALL government services actually cost more than projected, and this Administration is on record for thinking they can address just about any problem by “spending their way out of it”, and that “afordable target gets smaller and smaller.

Perhaps abandoning the approach of, “Everybody tells me I’m the smartest guy in the room, so I don’t need to listen to any advice, especially contradictory warnings, just do as I say” and returning to that old, tired process of listening to advice from all angles, considering actual, relevant experience and track records and hashing through the alternatives to construct a consensus plan, just might design a better mouse trap.

Not to beat a dead horse, or even a dead patient, over the “Affordable Care Act”, but I had to bring this “New York Time Article” to your attention. I’ll just add it to the ever indreasing list of I told you so’s about providing healthcare equally in the USA.
Don’t forget, the negatives are endless and hidden in the entire bill. Our media only tells us the negatives they want us to know about. Soften the blow, I guess. Now maybe those “Three Doctors” above will be added to the available pool of MD’s.